Going Down Swinging

by Billie Livingston

  “I don’t know. I didn’t tell him I was leaving, I just pretended everything was fine and when he went out this morning, I packed a bag and grabbed the money under the mattress. I took the bus to the airport and flew standby.” My sister’s fingers came up to pick a pimple on her chin. “There was a hundred and sixty-five bucks under the mattress.” Mum patted her hand away and Charlie hid her fist between her thighs. “I left him five.”

  Mum chuckled. Charlie tittered from her chest. Mum looked at her and giggled louder. Charlie laughed up her throat and through her nose, trying to hold her lip still so it wouldn’t hurt. Mum burst out a giant laugh. Charlie put her hand over her mouth and squeaked through her lips and palm. I laughed too but I wasn’t sure I got it, so I said, “It’d be enough to eat at McDonald’s for lunch. And dinner.” My sister howled now with all her fingers on her lip and doubled over, gurgling and making little acks and ha-has while Mum held the kitchen counter and wiped tears from her eyes. Our eyes flicked on each other and we got quiet and tried to hold back the noise still in our bellies, as if we were all hiding in a closet trying not to give ourselves away.

  So then I said, “But why didn’t you tell the police? They were there, they would’ve took him away.” Mum corrected my English and Charlie sighed and looked down at her basketball tummy. She rested her hands there and let her hair fall over her face. I looked back at Mum, she opened a kitchen cupboard and grabbed Adelle Davis’s Let’s Stay Healthy off the counter.

  “Charlie, we should put something on your face so it doesn’t scar. And here, you should take some ascorbic acid, it helps you heal, so I’ll give you some vitamin C … and B-complex and …” She sat down beside my sister with her arms full of brown plastic bottles. “First we’ll put some vitamin E right on your poor little facey.” Charlie looked at Mum’s mouth and watched her nip the end of a vitamin E capsule. She let her breath go like she’d been holding it all this time and closed her eyes while Mum drizzled oil over the hard black threads in her eyebrow, the split in her lip and across her nose.

  No maternity wear, no shopping for baby clothes, in fact she hardly talked about being pregnant at all. If Charlie looked like anything, it was tougher. She was still wearing the same tight jeans, except with the zipper down, big hippy blouses hanging over top, and her platform boots. And the boots seemed like they had their own scariness, like they were looking for a neck to stand on. She zipped all her money in those boots right along with her killer feet (she told me she knew how to high-kick someone right in the head now). She told me more than I ever remembered her telling, things I wanted to tell my friends with all the details right. My eyelids practically peeled back so I could see more of her when she told me about street fights she got in, gang fights, and how she learned to take care of herself from her boyfriend before last, the Hell’s Angel guy. Her eyes were more flicky when she told those stories, like she thought the door might fly open and something bigger and wilder than her was going to knock us all down. He was Cree Indian, the only Indian in the Hell’s Angels, she said, and he took her everywhere with him on the back of his motorcycle. She told me about dreams she had when they were together —crossing desert plains with feathers in her hair and a papoose on her back, straggling way behind the rest of the tribe. She didn’t have moccasins and her feet were burning, but she just kept walking, playing with two speckled eggs in her hands and singing Indian songs.

  It was her third night home and we were lying in bed, the bed where all three of us slept. Except Mum was out tonight. “His name was Shane,” she told me. Her eyes were closed now and I couldn’t tell if she was still in her dreams or back on the street with motorcycles. The swelling was down and the bruises were getting yellow, but the black slices on her nose and lip were still shiny with vitamin E oil and the stitches would be in for ten more days. “He had this thing for chicks with tattoos and I always thought they were kinda cool too, so-o …” she rolled her back to me and yanked down the neck of her T-shirt. An orangey yellow ball as big as one of Mum’s vitamin lids sat just on the back part of her shoulder. It had a red ribbon tied around it like a Christmas present. “It’s a peach,” she said. “Shane used to call me Peaches.” She let her T-shirt go and lay back on the mattress. “Actually, he said my boobs were like peaches.” I looked at her chest and thought about when we were all together in Toronto.

  A little while after my dad came and brought me and my mum with him to Toronto, Charlie came out to be with us too. This one time in the summer, we were sitting on Charlie’s bed, trying to think of something to do. Her sheets were rumply and warm and she was lying on her stomach complaining that she hated single beds cuz that’s what she had. So I said, “Why?—is someone staying over?”

  She giggled in her pillow, said, “That’d be the day,” and pulled herself up and sat beside me against the wall watching while I peeled a big bubble of skin off my heel. I flicked it beside my knee. “Eww!” She elbowed my ribs. “I have to sleep here, y’know.” I said sorry and put my legs straight so I wouldn’t get tempted. My feet came to just past her knees. I looked over at her shins that got shaved so much, her bones shined. Like Mum’s. Then I looked at my hairy sticks. Charlie took my arm closest to her and ran her finger along the skin. “Did you shave your arms?”

  “No. My arms!” I looked at hers and wondered if her and Mum did that too.

  “I just thought I remembered your arms being a lot hairier, like your legs—look at your legs—you look like an orangutan!”

  I giggled cuz of how I like being called monkeys and apes. She grabbed me and tickled under my arms, singing, “Monkey-girl, monkey-girl, Grace-face is a monkey-girl.” I doubled over, laughing and coughing and scrunching, trying to save my pits, scared she wasn’t going to stop and I’d suffocate and die. I started to yell and she whacked her hand over my mouth, in case Mum might hear and know we were just goofing off instead of getting out of the house.

  I fell away from her, still laughy, until I got my breath back enough to ask her, “So what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed like Mum. “It’s kind of boring here.”

  I twiddled my toes on each other, trying not to be boring, trying to make Toronto be fun. I said, “We could go to the park. I saw kids up there catching bees yesterday, in a jar. They had a big pickle jar and they put flowers in it and holes in the lid with a nail and they’d open the lid and catch bees off those purple round flower things and they’d shake ’em down like this …” I pretended a pickle jar and shook the bees to the bottom.

  Charlie watched me and then opened her mouth and said, “Why?” through a huge yawn.

  “Because you’d have a whole jar full of bees and bees and bees—probably a thousand—and you could put your ear over the lid and listen to them or you could make honey with them … Or um, oh!—or my friend Shelly who lives up at the top of the road, near where the corner store is? her cat has kittens. Maybe we could go see them?”

  “Really? Hey, do they have any black ones?”

  “I can’t remember. I only saw them once, in a box in their basement, and it was kind of dark.”

  My sister’s big eyes bugged a little and her eyebrows bounced. “Let’s get a kitten! That’d be so far out!” and she wiggled my kneecap. “’K, let’s go see ’em. Get dressed.”

  Charlie pulled off her nightgown and went over to her dresser and for a second I saw her from sideways. That was the first time I saw her totally bare naked since she came to Toronto. She bent forward to put on her underpants and all the sudden there was new jiggly stuff there. I got hypnotized.

  Charlie saw me gawking at her new boobies and went, “What’re you staring at?”

  I wanted to keep looking, but I said in a bratty voice, “I see your boobies.”

  She turned her back and grabbed her bra from the pile of clothes on her dresser. I crawled to the head of the bed where I could see them again. Charlie crossed her arms and told me to shut up over her shoulder. But I couldn’t now.
“I see Charlie’s BOO-OOBIES,” and I cackled like Dracula. Her face got all mad and she called me a pervert and then yelled me out of the room. I was laughing so much, I couldn’t hardly say the booby thing. She pulled a T-shirt on and stomped over to where I was and yanked me out of her room and slammed the door after me. And then she locked it.

  I kneeled and peeked through the keyhole, and sang all low, “I see Charlie’s boobies.” Charlie grabbed a sock off the floor and stuffed it in the keyhole. I plunked down on the floor and stared up at her door. She was never going to let me see them again and it was my own fault.

  But I couldn’t help it—she just grew them like that. Whole new parts of herself. Like she was a starfish or something. They weren’t big like my mum’s, but they stuck out like snow cones and wiggled like Jell-O. I thought of her old boyfriend Dwayne, from Vancouver, before she ran away from home, and wondered if she had those then and if he knew about them. I must’ve saw Mum’s a thousand times and never thought about them; maybe because they were always there, like her legs or her eyes.

  Ever since then, I suppose, I thought they were my secret, her boobies. It felt weird now knowing some biker guy’d seen them, but I just said, “How come you didn’t keep him, how come you started having Ian for your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. He was nicer than Ian. Ah, he was a dink too, though, they were both dinks. Every guy I go out with is a dink.” And she spread her fingers on her belly and rubbed softly. “Feel it,” she said, and I put my hands between hers. “Weird, eh,” and she watched me try to squish the middle of her. It was so hard and tight, like a balloon, and part of me wanted to bite, or pop it—slap it flat so it’d be just us two again. Then, like she knew what I was thinking or something, she said, “Aunt Jo thinks I should give it away.”

  “When were you talking to Aunt Jo?” Jo was Mum’s sister. She lived in Calgary with her husband and we hardly ever saw her—we never saw her.

  “I talk to her sometimes. I wrote to her when I was in Toronto and told her I was pregnant. I don’t know why.”

  “Aunt Jo? How come you told Aunt Jo? You didn’t even tell me.”

  “I don’t know. I guess I thought she wasn’t so close to the situation or something, so she could give me advice. I don’t know.”

  “Well, who would you give it to?”

  “I don’t know. Up for adoption. I probably wouldn’t even get to meet them. She says I’m being selfish and there’s lots of people in the world that can’t have children and here I am having one when I can’t even support it. I told her to fuck off. And then I started bawling. I’m so stupid. I’m such a gimp. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. But even Mum said it was none of her business to tell me that. Shit. Do you think I’m selfish?”

  I looked at her body and couldn’t stop thinking it was just stuffing under her T-shirt. I pulled it up to look at her ball. The skin was yanked tight and tiny blue and purple veins showed through and her belly button was pushed up even with her stomach. I patted and tapped and listened to the plunks it made. I put my forehead against it, then my ear, and faced Charlie’s chin. She drummed my forehead with her fingertips. “Hey goofball, tell me I’m not selfish.”

  “I don’t think you’re selfish. I love you. And I hate Ian’s guts for hitting you.”

  She smiled and scratched my head. “My baby,” she said, “my little Gracey-baby.” I sprawled over her stomach and Charlie poked at it. “Do you think it’ll be a boy or a girl?” she asked me. I sat up and thumped my palms on her again, a little harder. “I don’t know.”

  “What should I call it if it’s a girl?”

  “I don’t know. Call it Sneezy,” and I moved up beside her so our faces were close.

  Charlie pushed her head back in her pillow and giggled. “Sneezy Hoffman.” She turned her face to me. “Oh, who cares anyway.” She looked up at the ceiling. We rolled our heads toward each other and stared. She said, “I thought about calling it Grace cuz I thought that might make her special. But then I realized there’ll never be another you anyway. Right?” I didn’t say anything, just looked in Charlie’s big deer eyes. “It’s not going to be anything like you,” she said, “it won’t have orangutan arms and it won’t smell like honey …” She brought her fingers to my forehead and flattened the cowlick.

  “I don’t want you to have a baby,” I told her.

  “Ohhh, Grace-face … are you sad? Come here and hug me—it doesn’t matter if I have it, it won’t really be my baby, not my real baby. You’ll always be my only baby. I promise. I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, I won’t love it. I only love you.” Tears went down our cheeks and we fell asleep that way, holding hands between our chests, heads together, waking up just for a second when Mum came home and crawled in on the other side of Charlie.

  My sister was with us around three weeks when I asked her to go with me to the bookmobile. She didn’t feel like it. It was nearly May and the days were getting summery, so her and Mum were sprawled around the living room, legs all over the couch and chair arms, eating bread-and-butter pickles with crackers and cheese. Charlie bought treats and the three of us had picking-food for dinner: Cheez Whiz with celery, celery with peanut butter, Granny Smith apple slices, carrot sticks, cheddar cheese, Ritz crackers, Melba toast—and three Pep Chews, ice cream and Popcorn Twists for dessert. They were lazing and telling stories and Charlie didn’t want to move. “Geez, Grace, I’ve had to go pee for an hour now and I haven’t had the energy.”

  I left them laughing and went to get the phone in the bedroom so I could try and talk someone else into coming with me. I didn’t bother with Sadie and Eddy, they would’ve called ages ago if they were planning on it. I had to go, though; the week before, the librarian ’d talked me into getting James and the Giant Peach. She promised I’d like it, so I took it, even though it was about a boy, just to prove her wrong. But I loved it and now I had to go tell her and show how I read the whole thing in six days. I called Gabrielle instead. Her mother answered the phone and said she wasn’t finished dinner yet but she’d call as soon as she was done.

  Twenty to seven. Nobody ever didn’t get interrupted during dinner at our place.

  The bookmobile would only be there until eight. I went down the hall to the living room. A news guy was on and Charlie and Mum were talking about his head. “Last time I saw a rug that bad, it was on my bathroom floor,” and then this thing about Alaska came on and Mum said, “Hey, what do you call an Eskimo with a hard-on?” Charlie snorted before she even heard the answer. “A frigid midget with a rigid digit.” They both screamed and Charlie started begging, “Ah stop, I’m gonna pee my pants.”

  By ten past seven Gabrielle and I were walking down Main Street. We could see kids coming in and out of the long green bus from a block away. Even tough kids came to the bookmobile. All of us did. I had James and the Giant Peach under my arm. Gabrielle had Black Beauty. I already read that one too and I told her so. Then she asked about my sister, where her husband was. I told her she didn’t have one. I said it in a way that she’d see how cool my sister was, how no-big-deal this baby was. Her eyes looked worried. “What about the baby, it won’t have a dad. Does she know where he is?”

  I thought about whether to say this next part. It’d made my mum sigh and say oh-boy. It felt big though, and I wanted to try it out. “She’s doesn’t know who the father is.” Gabrielle’s face went limp like she was going to cry. “I mean she’s not sure. She started going around with Ian, the one who hit her, right after Shane, the motorcycle guy, and she got pregnant right around then—she’ll know when it gets born though; the old boyfriend was Indian, like the teepee kind, and the new guy was albino. Like a rat. And everyone in the albino guy’s family has red hair anyway. So if it’s dark, she’ll know.”

  Gabrielle got white. All she said was “oh” and kept her eyes down the rest of the way.

  There was about six kids on the bus, less than I figured. I let Gabrielle go ahead so I could look for the libraria
n with the long springs of black hair. I didn’t want to return the book without thanking her and telling her she was right. People’s favourite thing is when you say you-were-right to them. The only librarian was a lady with droopy eyes and a skinny mouth that went up at the corners every time a kid handed in a book.

  I wandered down to where Gabrielle was standing staring at a shelf. “Find anything?” I asked her. She turned and smiled like she was embarrassed. I wondered if she was still weird about what I told her—God, you’d think it was her that got pregnant. She said, “I’m trying to find Go Ask Alice. My sister read it and her friends read it and they won’t let me—I just want to see it.”

  I was one of the kids ahead of her on the wait-list. Everybody was. Charlie said she read some of it and didn’t know how come us kids cared; it was all about drugs, she said. But it had sex and swearing and drugs. And anyway, Sadie’d read it and I couldn’t stand her having anything over me.

  “I’ll go ask the lady,” I told her, and a girl walked behind and tripped into me. I looked after her; she kept going. I whispered, “Excuse me,” and went to ask the librarian.

  The lady’s eyebrows flicked up, but her mouth hardly moved. “Boy, you kids are sure crazy about that book. It’s got quite a few reserves ahead of you, so you might want to check back in a few weeks.”

  I trudged back to Gabrielle. “Same as school with all the holds, but um, how ’bout—” and the same girl passed behind and shoved her elbow into my back. I whipped around.

  “Oops. Scuse me,” she said, and stopped to look at a shelf near the front of the bus.

  Gabrielle watched after her and whispered, “That girl’s mean, I saw her fighting with a grade 3er before. A boy. She’s in grade 5, you know.”

  “Well, I’m telling if she does it again,” I told her, and Gabrielle chewed the inside of her cheeks. “I forgot what I was gonna say.” The grade 5 girl passed and elbowed me again, and pushed me into the shelf this time. I said, “Hey, quit it,” at her back and she stopped beside her friend, who was littler with freckles and red hair. The friend giggled. The bigger one made fun of my “quit it.”